Time Traveler

Federal charm meets midcentury modernity in a historic Long Island house

Most of us know a house -- we may pass it every day -- that has thoroughly captured our imagination; a house that possesses a powerful and enduring allure and makes us wonder what it would be like to live there. For Bob Weinstein, the owner of a Manhattan brand-imaging-and-graphic-design firm, and his partner, Eric Hensley, a flight attendant, that place was a house with a tidy Federal-style façade on a quiet street in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where the couple has owned a second home for a dozen years. "We always got a good feeling just walking by it. It had a kind of mystique," Hensley recalls. "There was a huge white-picket fence that curved around the edge of the property," Weinstein says of the lush, nearly one-acre lot. "The grounds were overgrown, but you could look through the trees and see the simple symmetry of the structure. It had presence. Of course, Eric and I never imagined we could ever buy it."

Apparently, no one else had either. When the owner died -- she was born in the house and lived to the age of 101 -- it went on the market, but there were no takers. "It needed a lot of work," explains Hensley, "and no one could figure out what to do with it." Like many old homes in Sag Harbor, this one had been built in stages. The earliest section, a one-room house, dated from 1750. Around 80 years later, subsequent owners began to construct additions, tacking on rooms and wings as needs and tastes dictated. By the new millennium, this jumble of spaces was unsuited to contemporary life. Dark, heavy Victorian wall and window treatments were the least of the problems. The main staircase was narrow and ungainly, and the ceilings in some rooms were so low -- presumably sized for shorter generations of the past -- they brushed the top of Hensley's head when he stood at his full six-foot-two-inch height. But such was the couple's love for the house, along with a drop in the asking price as an additional incentive, that they bought it.

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Weinstein soon began drafting possible solutions that would leave the exterior looking essentially the same, he says, to "respect the house's place in the town and not make it grander," but at the same time "revitalize it for modern living, giving it an airy sense of openness and ease." His friends were surprised he embraced a house from the 18th and 19th centuries given his devotion to midcentury-modernist furniture and his huge collection of Scandinavian ceramics. But Weinstein's plan for the renovation resulted in what he describes as an "unexpected feeling of light and volume" typical of a loft space. Second-floor maids' rooms were dispensed with to create a double-height kitchen-and-dining area. They moved and widened the staircase to create sight lines that run from one end of the house to the other on both axes. A mourning room, where bodies were laid out for wakes in the days predating funeral parlors, became a mudroom (dust to dust indeed), closed off from the front parlor by a door that doubles as a bookcase, an idea he got from a neighbor. Walls were refinished with white paint, and brown tongue-and-groove flooring taken up to reveal original plank floors that were sanded, bleached, and rubbed with white stain. "I tell my friends that I'm still a midcentury-design lover," Weinstein says. "Only now it's a different century."

Most of the old architectural details survive, including leaded panes, door and window frames, moldings, and the mantels surrounding the six fireplaces. Gilt-framed 18th-century portraits, culled from flea markets, are displayed prominently on the lower floor. In one striking touch, Weinstein and Hensley framed and hung fragments of the different wallpapers uncovered as the walls were stripped down to the plaster -- documents of the different lives of the house. Within this period envelope they installed furnishings by a roster of midcentury masters: a Florence Knoll sofa, Eero Saarinen tables, George Nelson and Arne Jacobsen chairs. Early-'50s Vladimir Kagan club chairs make a neat counterpoint to the trim lines of a Room & Board sofa in the living room, while the dining room's teak chairs by the Danish designer Kai Lyngfeldt Larsen shine with the same honeyed glow as a brass pendant light by the Finnish designer Paavo Tynell.

What holds it all together is the predominantly white color scheme, which draws in the famous sunlight that has long attracted artists to Long Island's East End, filling the house with an atmosphere of freshness. Like many before them, Weinstein and Hensley have a special reverence for Sag Harbor -- a village in the Hamptons, but not of the Hamptons. "Working on the house made us feel even more a part of the town," Weinstein says. "It was a way of giving back to it." And like the best gifts, this one honors both the giver and the receiver.

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